Seeing comes before words

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. (…) It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words”

These are J. Berger’s words. As I have said in my previous post, I do love reading him. Sometimes I even agree with him! In his view the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. For example, in the evenings we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from the sun. Yet this explanation, he says, never quite fits the sight. And he is right, it doesn’t. But I still do not see the gap between words and seeing. The relation between them is settled; regardless of what we know, we say the sun goes down. To fit the sight when we actually know the sun doesn’t go anywhere.